Perhaps by human nature, we learn at an early age that bigger is always better. Why take the small cookie when you can have that big one in the corner, or two fries are better than one right? As we get older, we take this bigger is better approach and apply it to other things in life, men lust after the 400 horsepower sports car while women are dazzled by the huge diamond engagement ring, even though we don't truly need these things. Video cards fall under this same trap as well, only here the feature that can get less knowledgeable consumers who aren't careful isn't clock speed, it's the amount of video memory present on the graphics card that makes the difference. - FiringSquad

Palit GeForce 8800 GT 1GB Super+ SLI Ready Review

Now granted, we're not necessarily saying more memory is a bad thing, just that the memory question is harder to answer. Last month we took a look at a GeForce 8800 GT 256MB card from XFX and found that in cases without anti-aliasing it performed similarly to the more expensive GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, but once you cranked up the anti-aliasing, the 512MB card really began to pull away from the 256MB board. But what if you find yourself playing older games based on less intensive game engines, or you're saddling the extra memory up to a slower GPU that can't take advantage of the additional memory?

With the GeForce 8800 GT proving wildly popular with consumers, it was only a matter of time before the one-upmanship among card manufacturers spread to this GPU. First out of the gate was ASUS, announcing the world's first GeForce 8800 GT card with 1GB of memory. In the days following ASUS' announcement, several other NVIDIA board partners announced their own GeForce 8800 GT 1GB versions, but to date none of these cards have made it to the shelves of US retailers. Then, in the final days of 2007, we received word from Palit that their GeForce 8800 GT 1GB cards had just arrived.

In comparing Palit's GeForce 8800 GT 1GB Super+ card to the stock GeForce 8800 GT 512MB we received back in November, we can see quite a few changes have been made to the reference GeForce 8800 GT board design. The most drastic difference however is the board's cooling. Whereas the stock GeForce 8800 GT reference board design relies on a single slot cooling solution, Palit has incorporated a dual slot cooler for their Super+ card. The Palit cooler is somewhat similar to the Orb designs used by Zalman on their VF900 line of coolers, although rather made from aluminum than copper.

Besides the unique cooling unit, Palit has incorporated a few changes to their board design in comparison to the stock GeForce 8800 GT reference board. We've heard rumors that NVIDIA has made a few tweaks to their original GeForce 8800 GT reference board design to make it cheaper to produce, so we're unsure how many of the changes on the Super+ came from Palit versus the revised GeForce 8800 GT board design. While the concept of a GeForce 8800 GT 1GB version looks good on paper, in practice with today's latest games, the additional memory largely sits unused.

In the majority of our benchmarks, the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB card delivered performance that was roughly on par with the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, there were only a couple of cases where the extra memory really impacted the performance, most notably Oblivion and Crysis at the so called high definition gaming resolutions. In both of these situations the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB was able to outperform the 512MB version by a significant margin. The bottom line is that the stock GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is simply outstanding, adding another 512MB just doesn't yield the performance boost some were expecting.

Palit's GeForce 8800 GT 1GB Super+ is still a very nice card though. The custom cooler Palit has developed performs significantly better than the stock GeForce 8800 GT reference cooler designed by NVIDIA. The only downside to the Palit cooler is that it requires a second slot. Although we'd advise our readers to save their money and opt for the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, or if you can afford to spend the $350-400 that the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB Super+ sells for, get the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB instead.